Pooua, the quad is actually heavier than your estimate for an orbital vehicle...

Yes. What does that tell you?

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

and Johno, I know the resolution limit of a 50cm mirror. I've stated it a couple of times in this thread. You would know had you paid attention. I didn't suggest they check it because I wanted to know. I asked so that they could know as well.

Pooua, the quad is actually heavier than your estimate for an orbital vehicle...

and Johno, I know the resolution limit of a 50cm mirror. I've stated it a couple of times in this thread. You would know had you paid attention. I didn't suggest they check it because I wanted to know. I asked so that they could know as well.

Let me get this straight. You asked somebody a question, not because you wanted to know the answer, but because you thought it was in their best interest to find out the answer? And even though it was a basic pre-college physics question, and you were asking people with several rocket sciencey qualifications, you thought that they had never figured this out for themselves! I'm starting to think that maybe you really do believe that you are the only intelligent person in the world. Do you think that the people around you in the world go into stasis whenever you are not interacting with them? I give up. Nobody on here can possibly help you to see yourself as you really are. Your head is so far up your own backside that you really need professional help. Lots of it. And serious drugs. And a bit of surgery probably wouldn't hurt either.

Dan, would you care to answer why you keep posting the same absurd demand when It would be illegal to Armadillo to lauch such a telescope?

Even if they developed the capability to launch such a payload, it would be impossible to obtain the permit to do launch it.

Besides, if they did that anyway, how do you think they would handle the data transmission and reception?

Why do you think this would be financially sound? How do you think the launch of a satellite built to do illegal private spionage could be funded?

And why do you think the US government would let such a satellite remain in orbit? They have the capability to destroy such a satellite before the area 51 images could be obtained.

And what is it with the area 51 obsession? Were you looking for a different kind of space fellowship?

If you are a genius and a coder, you should look into profiting from your ideas until you have the funds to pay for your satellite. Elon Musk, John Carmack, Paul Allen, Mark Shuttleworth and Bill Gates are just some of the men that profited from ther talents until they had the funds to pursue their dreams. Be one of them.

Dan, would you care to answer why you keep posting the same absurd demand when It would be illegal to Armadillo to lauch such a telescope?

Even if they developed the capability to launch such a payload, it would be impossible to obtain the permit to do launch it.

Besides, if they did that anyway, how do you think they would handle the data transmission and reception?

Well, there are other difficulties, too.

In theory, a 50 cm telescope could resolve objects as small as 20 cm that are located 400 km distant using visible light. That neglects atmospheric turbulance, clouds, dust, rain. Also, as a satellite orbiting 400 km altitude wouldn't be traveling at the same relative speed as the ground underneath it, the telescope would need some way of tracking objects that probably are traveling several hundreds of kilometers/hour slower than it is. These are bigger problems than the diffraction limited optics.

tabajara, I am aware of the 1L, both old and recent concept. they promised it would go into production in 2010. I think they promised it several years earlier too. they lie a lot. all of the big auto companies are complete bastards or grossly incompetent. likely both. should it ever be produced it is a fairly interesting vehicle and was part of the inspiration for my design (as I write on the website) but it is a closed body, larger volume, presumably worse aerodynamics, higher weight because it's still somewhat built like a conventional car with heavy wheels etc, so it's not as lean as mine.My request of AA is far from absurd. I stand by my suggestion and maybe in the future it will be clear to even most that I am right. most of you don't have the persistance of mind to remember your mistakes though but that's the cross I bear. While I have a significant disdain for the us military and associated agencies, it is far from impossible to get a permit for such a satellite, even though the permit might limit the effective resolution of the images you publish. I'm not sure of the details and they probably make them us as they go. I imagine that a 50cm resolution permit is possible. 1 meter has been granted to for instance the IKONOS sat. it might well be possible to use much higher res for personal use and occasional accidental publication should they decide to 'shoot it down' somehow they would have tipped their hand and get a lot of attention they might not like.As for all the famous rich boys you mention, they made their money on single minded pursuit and probably only later learned there is more to life than a single business. I have always favored true pursuits over the illusion of money and as a result I am now significantly wiser and in the know than all of them. Despite being younger than all of them. I may have to pull a financial rabbit out of a hat as a means to an end but I will not let go of the overview to be fooled into the pursuit of money. Things are far from what they appear to be. You have no idea what you are and what this world is. But this is far ahead of what you are ready to handle given that you cannot even handle the most mundane things such as the need to break free of nasa and such and how possible and cool it would be to have live high powered eyes in the sky. how I could shake this world with such an instrument. of course I would probably end up with a .22 behind the ear but as Obiwan said, strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. This is the way of all great men. There was this one guy, back in the day..

Pooua, I can't be certain but I hunch that because the atmosphere is only a very thin layer at the end of the optical path (even though the light goes the other way) that atmospheric heat shimmer will be largely insignificant to even fantastic 'zoom'. it is much the same as how an uneven glass surface shows a motif behind it clearly if it is close to it, but if you put the glass close to your eye everything is fuzzy even though the target motif is no further away.and while it is true that the ground is moving very rapidly relative to the satellite, space is a very tranquil place and you can align the rotational speed of the telescope so calmly and smoothly as to match the motion of the surface of the earth well enough to get good clear calm pictures. it might well be possible to track it perfectly to within a single pixel motion so the image is rock steady even though the satellite will roll over any location on the planet in about 1-2 minutes. the mere fact that you have never seen such video should tell you alot about the gatekeepers. they have perhaps a hundred telescopes each far better than hubble and it is said, and I believe it to be accurate, that they had space telescopes in the 70s with which you could read the license plate of a car on the ground.Anyone who thinks can know that Nasa is an organization of corruption and mediocrity standing in the shadow of the real efforts carried out shrouded from public view. Eisenhower cowardly warned against it, Kennedy warned against secrecy. you can look it up.

idiom, can you mention any space telescopes with mirrors as large as hubble in private hands? I can't rule it out but never heard of such a thing. There certainly are better telescopes up there but I would guess they are all in gov hands or gov proxy hands, some maybe cleptocratic proxies vis a vis the undue influence Eisenhower warned against.

idiom, can you mention any space telescopes with mirrors as large as hubble in private hands? I can't rule it out but never heard of such a thing. There certainly are better telescopes up there but I would guess they are all in gov hands or gov proxy hands, some maybe cleptocratic proxies vis a vis the undue influence Eisenhower warned against.

If Armadillo but up a 3 metre telescope tomorrow that Armadill exclusively owned, the American government would still totally control its output. This is the point you seem to be missing.

It is illegal for any American to give out any image taken in space without express DoD permission.

If you want the images you are talking about, then you have to take them as a non-American.

Pooua, maybe consider that people wouldn't go to the trouble of putting satellites in space if a balloon was better...how many times do I have to show your points of critique are in error before you start considering I am right...

Pooua, maybe consider that people wouldn't go to the trouble of putting satellites in space if a balloon was better...

Satellites are not always better than balloons. Satellites cost much more than balloons, are much more distant, are virtually impossible to repair if they break and necessarily travel at high velocity and go into Earth shadow. So, unless you have some special need that could only be met by using a satellite, a balloon might be better. My question is, what special need would you have that requires a satellite, as opposed to using a balloon?

Pooua, for mapping the entire world repeatedly and mapping the sky. I think you would find doing that in a balloon... inconvenient

idiom, I think you will find it expensive to do a suborbital jump everytime you want to see something. and it would be a less than subtle way to do recon.the only suborbital flight of use that I can think of off the top of my head is a transcontinental jumper. a modern day replacement of the concorde. London to Sydney in 60 minutes. NY to LA in 25.but flying people requires a serious reliability

So, lets say you can provide photographs that orbital satellites cannot. Lets say the US Military would like those pictures. How expensive would the flight have to be before the DoD or the CIA or the NSA said 'sorrry we cannot afford that"? A satellite going over head every 90 minutes is not exactly subtle.

Also you should look up the SUSTAIN or Responsive Space Military Conferences for many many other sub-orbital applications with a lot of funding waiting for AA or others to be ready with a product.

You should, with a little imagination, be able to think up dozens of other uses for sub-orbital flights.

You still failed to mention WHY Armadillo should do it, besides your desire to take a look at Area 51. As idiom said, there are already many US commercial satellites in orbit that have the capability to do what you want, but can't sell pictures of national security installations in the US with a resolution sharper than 50cm. That won't block you from purchasing images from an entity that is not controlled by the US government, though.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

I stand by my suggestion and maybe in the future it will be clear to even most that I am right. most of you don't have the persistance of mind to remember your mistakes though but that's the cross I bear.

Please, do tell us why. That way you will be able to say "I told you!" later on.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

While I have a significant disdain for the us military and associated agencies,

Why? US citizens might feel bad about the waste of their taxes, but that is par or the course for bureaucracies around the world. Is ESA any better? Has any other government/agencies accomplished as much? US government funded the research that made possible modern life as we know it. If you are going to be angry at the US, their oil industry is a better target.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

it is far from impossible to get a permit for such a satellite, even though the permit might limit the effective resolution of the images you publish. I'm not sure of the details and they probably make them us as they go. I imagine that a 50cm resolution permit is possible. 1 meter has been granted to for instance the IKONOS sat. it might well be possible to use much higher res for personal use and occasional accidental publication should they decide to 'shoot it down' somehow they would have tipped their hand and get a lot of attention they might not like.

In the meantime, the image resolution of commercial satellites continues to improve. GeoEye’s IKONOS, currently its premier satellite, provides resolution at better than one meter, but the company plans this August to launch GeoEye-1, a polar orbiting satellite equipped with a camera that can capture up to 700,000 square kilometers of black-and-white and 350,000 square kilometers of color imagery a day. The satellite, equipped with GPS, will be able to swivel and point its camera with a ground resolution of 41 centimeters?.

“From 423 miles in space, we’ll be able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond,” says Brender. “GeoEye-1 will have the best accuracy and resolution of any commercial imaging satellite in the world when it goes up,” says Bill Schuster, GeoEye’s CEO.

For nongovernment customers, however, GeoEye-1 will still have to degrade that high-quality imagery to half a meter. The main barrier for commercial companies like GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which supplies satellite imagery to Google, is not technology but economics and policy; there’s no point taking sharper pictures if they aren’t allowed to sell them widely. Some of the best future images, meanwhile, may come from foreign competitors focused on increasing satellite resolution themselves. As Glackin points out, in 1980 only five countries were operating imaging satellites. “Today there are 31,” he says.

(...)

Attempts to control satellite imagery are “a losing proposition,” agrees Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive and a longtime expert on satellite reconnaissance. “These capabilities keep improving, and the sources of imagery keep expanding; look at countries that have launched high-resolution commercial imagery satellites over the last years. As that number goes up, it’s difficult to prevent people who want to get images of particular locations from getting them.”

(...)

Some countries may still be battling the onslaught of available imagery, but here in the United States, the Pentagon has realized the futility of de-Googling Earth: Both U.S. Northern Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say they don’t actively trawl the Internet looking for images of sensitive U.S. sites, although commercial satellite service could be interrupted if profound risk were perceived. When asked whether GeoEye is prohibited from selling imagery of any sensitive areas, Brender said no. As proof, he e-mailed, in midconversation, a detailed picture of Area 51, showing new construction at the Air Force’s top secret testing facility in Nevada, including new hangars and a lengthened runway.

You are wrong about the a satellite being better than a balloon, though; pictures taken from inside our atmosphere can have a higher resolution and will e taken at a fraction of the cost.

But the question that remains is why should they do this, why should they develop the capability, a image acquisition system (an admirable endeavour in itself) and brave the sea of bureaucracy that would be thrown at them?

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

As for all the famous rich boys you mention, they made their money on single minded pursuit and probably only later learned there is more to life than a single business. I have always favored true pursuits over the illusion of money and as a result I am now significantly wiser and in the know than all of them. Despite being younger than all of them. I may have to pull a financial rabbit out of a hat as a means to an end but I will not let go of the overview to be fooled into the pursuit of money.

By all means, tell us (or at least tell me) why you are the chosen one! Enlight our path with your wisdom!

You should at least respect this very accomplished group that I quoted, and that you do not know ate least 90% of what they think or what they do. Before saying you are better than someone, you should tell us your credentials, what was the crteria you used to judge them.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

Things are far from what they appear to be. You have no idea what you are and what this world is. But this is far ahead of what you are ready to handle given that you cannot even handle the most mundane things

Why would you believe so? I could be Christ for all you know.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

such as the need to break free of nasa and such and how possible and cool it would be to have live high powered eyes in the sky. how I could shake this world with such an instrument. of course I would probably end up with a .22 behind the ear but as Obiwan said, strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Please tell us what there is to be seen. That would be the way to convince someone to join your cause.

Dan Frederiksen wrote:

This is the way of all great men. There was this one guy, back in the day.

Are you sure you follow his teachings? Where are your great works, your sacrifice for your fellow man?